git annex assistant --autostart will start separate daemons in each
listed autostart repo
running the webapp outside any git-annex repo will open it on the
first listed autostart repo
This avoids forking another process, avoids polling, fixes a race,
and avoids a rare forkProcess thread hang that I saw once time
when starting the webapp.
Now it starts really, really fast! Down from 15 minutes or so on my big
tree to around 1 minute.
The trick is to remember the last time the daemon was running. Links with a
ctime from before that point don't need to be restaged on startup (as long
as they are correct), since the old daemon would have handled them already.
We also assume that if the daemon has never run before, any links that
already exist are good. The pre-commit hook fixes links, so this should be
a safe assumption.
Adds another MVar holding a DaemonStatus data structure. Also
allowed getting rid of the Annex.Fast hack. This data structure will
probably grow a lot of details about the daemon's status, that will
later be used by the webapp's UI.
The code to actually track when the daemon was last running is not written
yet. It's 3 am.
The idea, not yet done, is to use this to detect when a file
has an old change time, and avoid expensive restaging of the file.
If git-annex watch keeps track of the last time it finished a full scan,
then any symlink that is older than that time must have been scanned
before, so need not be added. (Relying on moving, copying, etc of a file
all updating its change time.)
Anyway, this info is available for free since inotify already checks it,
so it might as well make it available.
Now really only done in the startup scan.
It turns out to be quite hard for event handlers to know when the startup
scan is complete. I tried to make addWatch pass that info, but found
threading the state very difficult. For now, a quick hack, using the fast
flag.
Note that it's actually possible for inotify events to come in while the
startup scan is still ongoing. Due to my hack, the expensive check will
be done for files added in such inotify events.
This requires a relatively expensive test at file add time to see if it's
in git already. But it can be optimised to only happen during the startup
scan.
I thought this might be a lock conflict that explains the deadlock when
built with -threaded, but it seems not.. it still locks! It even locks
without the committer thread.
Indeed, it locks when running "git annex add"! -threaded is exposing some
other problem.
Still, this seems conceptually cleaner and did not add any inneficiencies.
Also added some high-level documentation about the threads used.
The commit thread now has access to a channel containing the times of
all uncommitted changes. This lets it be smart about detecting busy times
when a batch job is running (such as rm -rf, or untarring something, etc),
and avoid committing until it's done. While at the same time, instantly
committing one-off changes that the user is going to expect to see
immediately.
I had to use STM to implement the channel, because of
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/4154
While this adds a dependency, I always wanted to use STM, so this actually
makes me happy. ;)
Also happy that shouldCommit is a pure function, so other commit smartness
strategies can easily be played with. Although the current one seems pretty
good.
There is one bug, for some reason it does double commits, every time.
There's a race adding a new file to the annex: The file is moved to the
annex and replaced with a symlink, and then we git add the symlink. If
someone comes along in the meantime and replaces the symlink with
something else, such as a new large file, we add that instead. Which could
be bad..
This race is fixed by avoiding using git add, instead the symlink is
directly staged into the index.
It would be nice to make `git annex add` use this same technique.
I have not done so yet because it currently runs git update-index once per
file, which would slow does `git annex add`. A future enhancement would be
to extend the Git.Queue to include the ability to run update-index with
a list of Streamers.
Uses a MVar again, as there seems no other way to thread the state through
inotify events.
This is a rather unsatisfactory result. I had wanted to run them in
the same monad so that the git queue could be used to coleasce git commands
and speed things up. But, that led to fragility: If several files are
added, and one is removed before queue flush, git add will fail to add
any of them. So, the queue is still explicitly flushed after each add for
now.
TODO: Investigate using git add --ignore-errors. This would need to be done
in Command.Add. And, git add still exits nonzero with it, so would need
to avoid crashing on queue flush.
When a new file is annexed, a deletion event occurs when it's moved away
to be replaced by a symlink. Most of the time, there is no problimatic
race, because the same thread runs the add event as the deletion event.
So, once the symlink is in place, the deletion code won't run at all,
due to existing checks that a deleted file is really gone.
But there is a race at startup, as then the inotify thread is running
at the same time as the main thread, which does the initial tree walking
and annexing. It would be possible for the deletion inotify to run
in a perfect race with the addition, and remove the newly added symlink
from the git cache.
To solve this race, added event serialization via a MVar. We putMVar
before running each event, which blocks if an event is already running.
And when an event finishes (or crashes!), we takeMVar to free the lock.
Also, make rm -rf not spew warnings by passing --ignore-unmatch when
deleting directories.
And just like that, annexed files can be moved and copies around within
the tree, and are automatically fixed to point to the content, and staged
in git. Huzzah!
Delete still remains TODO, with its troublesome race during add..
Improved the inotify code, so it will also notice directory removal
and symlink creation.
In the watch code, optimised away a stat of a file that's being added,
that's done by Command.Add.start. This is the reason symlink creation is
handled separately from file creation, since during initial tree walk
at startup, a stat was already done, and can be reused.
So far this only handles auto-annexing new files that are created inside
the repository while it's running. To make this really useful,
it needs to at least:
- notice deleted files and stage the deletion
(tricky; there's a race with add..)
- notice renamed files, auto-fix the symlink, and stage the new file location
- periodically auto-commit staged changes
- honor .gitignore, not adding files it excludes
Also nice to have would be:
- Somehow sync remotes, possibly using a push sync like dvcs-autosync
does, so they are immediately updated.
- Somehow get content that is unavilable. This is problimatic with inotify,
since we only get an event once the user has tried (and failed) to read
from the file. Perhaps instead, automatically copy content that is added
out to remotes, with the goal of all repos eventually getting a copy,
if df allows.
- Drop files that have not been used lately, or meet some other criteria
(as long as there's a copy elsewhere).
- Perhaps automatically dropunused files that have been deleted,
although I cannot see a way to do that, since by the time the inotify
deletion event arrives, the file is deleted, and we cannot see what
its symlink pointed to! Alternatievely, perhaps automatically
do an expensive unused/dropunused cleanup process.
Some of this probably needs the currently stateless threads to maintain
a common state.
